Trump loves using soldiers as props — until they make him look bad

In 1969, Life magazine ran a feature that polarized America. They posted the pictures of 242 young men who had been killed in the span of a week in Vietnam.

The pages showed young men, some of them teenagers, either in their military uniforms or in yearbook photos. The story showed the human cost of the war. It was a direct counter to the Pentagon’s reliance on kill-counts and ratios.

Prior to that, to show the war was being won, the military would harp on enemy body-counts as proof of victory. The argument was sold to Americans who wanted to remain convinced that the war was justifiable that even if we were losing hundreds of men a week, we were killing thousands of the enemy.

However, seeing faces of fallen soldiers in such a massive quantity did affect how Americans viewed kill counts. When you see past the number and see the faces of the dead you start to care less about those that we are killing and care more about those of ours that have been killed.

The same thing happened during World War II. Newspapers around the country would print the names of the dead along with the location of their deaths. The impact of seeing thousands of names printed in papers instead of a four-to-five-digit figure caused Americans to put immense pressure on Franklin Roosevelt and later Harry Truman to end the war as fast as possible.

This past week, Trump and his administration decided that kill counts are back and that deaths that make the president look bad don’t actually count. The Pentagon decided it needed to reduce the number of killed in action from 18 back down to 14. Because these four brave Americans died during a cease-fire, they are not being counted as casualties of war. Even though........

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